"Untitled #205" (1989) by Cindy Sherman

"Untitled #205" (1989) by Cindy Sherman. Color photograph. 53 1/2 x 40 1/2 inches. Source.

Since 1977, Cindy Sherman has made photographs of herself, which are not self-portraits. "I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me," the artist has said. Her endeavor has yielded multiple series of photographs in which she deftly investigates issues about the construction of self-image, particularly for women. In her first works, small black-and-white photographs known as the "Untitled Film Still" series, Sherman explores stereotypes of women in films of the 1950s and 1960s. In a more recent series, Sherman made much larger color photographs restaging the settings of various European portrait paintings of the fifteenth through early nineteenth centuries. In Untitled, 1989, Sherman poses as La Forinara, just as the model might have been painted by her lover, the 16th century Italian painter Raphael, or later by Ingres, except that Sherman's Forinara exposes milk-swollen (plastic) breasts and cradles a (false) pregnant belly beneath her shawl.

See also: previous post.